The canon of contemporary literature that may be perused by English readers has been favored by an addition from an author whose major work has, hitherto, gone untranslated in this country. If "Nostalgia" is indicative of the quality to be found in Romanian novelist, poet and critic Mircea Cartarescu's other 20-plus books, there is much to anticipate. Though indebted to the masters of magical realism and to the forerunners of that school, to which the author vociferously alludes, there is more than enough space in the republic of letters for another cartographer of dreams who crowds one's space and invades one's perspective with voluptuous mystification.

To be born with the capacity for reflection is to await nostalgia's sting. If there's one profession that's typically beset by a surfeit of contemplation, it's artists. But it may appear somewhat routine to make writers the dominating characters of a novel or, as in the case of the book's epilogue, a musician. But as with Cartarescu's plowing of a readily recognizable genre -- the investigation into the dream-life of a city (in this case, Bucharest during its communist dictatorship) -- "Nostalgia," which was originally published in 1989, is glowingly insouciant with regard to art and the uselessness of such an endeavor.

George R.R. Martin Says "Game of Thrones" Spinoff Could Arrive by 2019Wochit

John Boyega Releases Poster for "Pacific Rim: Uprising"Wochit

7 celebrity pairs that could be relatedWibbitz

'Family Matters' home is going to be demolishedFox5Atlanta

Indeed, in "The Roulette Player," the book opens with a literary writer who has toiled away for 60 years, and whose work has brought him little satisfaction, "I have written a few thousand pages of literature -- powder and dust. ... You would like to turn the reader's heart inside out, but what does he do? At three he's done with your book, at four he takes up another, no matter how great the book you placed in his hands."

In its theme and manner, this prologue brilliantly channels a Dostoyevskian spirit teeming with calculation, self-loathing and an eagerness to cavort before an audience -- in this instance, death. Sounding many of the novel's recurrent symbols -- the spider, the degenerate, the chrysalis, and God -- as well as its major motifs -- the porousness of reality with regard to fiction, the artist's thirst for sustainable transcendence, and the inflexible failure to reach that end -- the story describes the narrator's odyssey into an underground world of gambling centered on the game of Russian roulette. As the narrator depicts the erosion of the milieu, owing to the exploits of an unearthly, lucky player, who invests the game with a "theological grandeur" through frequent play and a steady increase of bullets in the chamber, "The Roulette Player" skates into a metaphysical register, markedly drawing sustenance from Borges. To repeat, while a lesser, more anxious writer might try to camouflage his literary inheritance, Cartarescu is thoroughly at ease exhibiting his literary genes. The details that braid "Nostalgia's" stories together -- affirming the notice on its cover that it's a novel, which is to say that it's cohesive -- are so deftly executed that charges of derivation may be discarded as easily as used cellophane.

The cruelty of children, which the narrator of "The Roulette Player" touches upon when describing the malefic childhood behavior of the avatar of said game, forms another of the runnels that course through the novel's stories. In "Mentardy," a group of rowdy boys, who harbor a taste for animal cruelty, have their tendencies briefly checked when they encounter a child seer. Originally the nickname of a boy named Dan, who "would step on the balustrade surrounding the [apartment] building's terrace and shout at [his friends] from the height of eight floors, gesticulating and pretending to fall," "Mentardy" is passed on to the new neighborhood kid, who wins the boys over with his own vertiginous display and, by dint of his storytelling skill, briefly assumes the mantle of top dog. But when a flirtation with a girl -- a matter of consternation for the boys -- erupts into the childhood equivalent of a sex scandal via a stumbled upon game of doctor, Mentardy's status plummets like a debunked forgery. The subtexts of "Mentardy" -- the transference of identity, the power of narrative, the gulf between the sexes, misogyny and dangers of the amorous relationship for an artist -- are amplified further in the subsequent stories "The Twins" and "REM."

This thumbnail overview of some of "Nostalgia's" contours would be inadequate if it neglected to mention its multitude of flowering sentences. Consider a few such examples:

"We pushed our fur hats against each other, tried to embrace while fighting our heavy coats, stared in each other's eyes in that frozen gloom that latched icy stars to our eyelashes."

"We spent a moment in suspension and then, like lizards in the morning, shook off the stupor and returned to our limited life."

"I don't like the substances from which poetry is made: smells too much like ether, like nail polish. You have to consume your own self too much ... The true prose writer consumes others."

"Underneath, hundreds of meters below our feet, we saw Bucharest stretching out before us, torturous as a labyrinth drowning in a vortex of dust ... With workers' districts like cakes you are averse to eating."

For anyone with a fondness for narrative convolutions who isn't averse to that peculiar, salutary, literary form of blackout -- where one has the impression of time well spent, even if one isn't sure exactly of all that transpired -- this book is for you. And if blackouts aren't your thing but mind-warping literature is, read this book, then read it again.

Latest from the SFGATE homepage:

Click below for the top news from around the Bay Area and beyond. Sign up for our newsletters to be the first to learn about breaking news and more. Go to 'Sign In' and 'Manage Profile' at the top of the page.